I'd favor a few incremental changes to mitigate some of the worst excesses of English spelling, but I'm not a fan of wholesale re-engineering. A phonemic standard would necessarily be based on one major dialect and would thus alienate many others; a more egalitarian approach would have to be diaphonemic, preserving a broad range of distinctions while ignoring some of the more recent innovations, and a cleaned-up version of our current spelling would basically be that.

If we're only aiming for a pronunciation guide for (American) teaching use, as appears to be the case with Truespel – again, I think this would be counterproductive because it would keep Americans alienated from IPA, which is the closest thing we have to a universal standard for transcribing speech. A broad phonemic or diaphonemic IPA transcription would be far better.

I think they're destined for the same fate as every other proposed spelling reform in the history of the language, which is to be completely ignored and vanish into the mists of time because nobody uses them.

"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrupwww.commodorejohn.com - in case you were wondering, which you probably weren't.

Also, what on earth is up with spelling "sing" "seeng"? <ee> almost always represents /i:/ but the <i> in sing is /ɪ/ in pretty much every dialect I know (I'd have thought even in pin-pen merging ones).

I think there's a separate (from merging pin-pen) phenomenon where /ɪ/ is raised before /ŋ/.

(Though I think the -ing morpheme is generally pronounced with /i/.)

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

I have unraised [ɪŋ] both in words like "king", and in the "-ing" morpheme. But yeah, it is common through much of North America to raise these to [iŋ]. Some speakers even go one step further and change the "-ing" morpheme to [in], so that "going", for example, sounds like "goeen".

eSOANEM wrote:Also, what on earth is up with spelling "sing" "seeng"? <ee> almost always represents /i:/ but the <i> in sing is /ɪ/ in pretty much every dialect I know (I'd have thought even in pin-pen merging ones).

Lazar wrote:But yeah, it is common through much of North America to raise these to [iŋ]. Some speakers even go one step further and change the "-ing" morpheme to [in], so that "going", for example, sounds like "goeen".

Wow, I was genuinely shocked by this, as I've never noticed such a thing. But then I realized that in the word "reading" I do tend to raise the final vowel slightly. Strangely, I can't think of any other words where I do this, nor where I've noticed people doing it (not even seemingly analogous words like "breeding" or "feeding").